The Animal Concerns Research and Education Society (Acres) rescued five wild boars, including three piglets, who were found trapped and in distressed inside a metal cage off Sime Road, outside the Central Catchment Nature Reserve, on Sunday afternoon October 7.

The politician and the founder of Acres, MP Louis Ng stated in a Facebook post that an informer alerted the authority about these trapped animals. Later, an Acres team was deployed and they rescued those animals and released them back into the wild.

He also added in the post, which includes a video of the incident that even though the trap was removed safely, an investigation on who laid the trap is going on.

Acres received the call on its wildlife rescue number at around 3.30 pm and within half an hour the team reached the location. Almost 15 minutes later, officers from Agri-Food and Veterinary Authority (AVA) also arrived at the location.

Reports stated that the deputy chief executive of Acres, Anbarasi Boopal said that the trap was made and placed for targeting wild boars, as it had a food bait and the size of it was quite big, which is almost 1.2 m by 1.8.

She stated that it is not possible to say when exactly these animals were caught, but she believes that it happened most probably on Saturday morning or early afternoon. Anbarasi added that this is the first case when Acres had to come across a trap placed at a location.

She said that she saw that while a piglet was climbing on top of its mother, other two adult pigs were repeatedly pushing against the cage, as they were trying to get out of the cage and it was clearly visible that those animals were extremely stressed out.

While describing the situation Anbarasi also added that the cage was placed at the roadside that had vehicular traffic, which also caused irritated those animals.

However, the rescue team took almost 15 minutes to release them, as they had to make sure the safety of those animals before opening the cage door.

As per AVA, from 2011 to 2015, the number of animal cruelty and welfare feedback received by AVA rose from 410 to 840. But, the investigation process also has some serious challenges such as 1) Lack of eyewitnesses and direct evidence (e.g. relevant CCTV footages), 2) Carcasses disposed of off or in bad condition before the case was reported to AVA. This renders post-mortem analysis impossible and 3) Cases not reported to AVA for follow-up or the reports are delayed, which may impede investigations.